I'd forgotten that you couldn't choose the alignment of log blocks in those days, so my plan to make pleasant, horizontal log walls was buggered. That was when I hit my first big limitation. By the time evening fell on the valley like a brick, I had a good stack of oak logs, and made to hurriedly throw up my cabin walls so I could spend the dark hours working on the inside. Deciding that ol' Black Philip had been an omen showing me where to build, like the snake and the eagle at Tenochtitlan, I flattened out the little promontory where the sheep had manifested, and crossed the lake to engage in a Minecraft staple that's been there since day one: punching trees. Still, there was no time to waste looking at devilish farm animals, as after burning half the day in finding the site and then gawking at it, I was running out of daylight. deliciously?" Here's the old title screen, by the way, for comparison's sake.
As I took in the view, a single black sheep waddled into view right at the centre of my vision, and evoked 2016 horror movie The Witch a little more than I felt comfortable with. It looked exactly as it always had, preserved like a mosquito in amber made of congealed maths, and it looked exactly how it should. Some buried process in my brain - no doubt evolved for something actually useful back in the hellish savannahs of the late Pleistocene - knew exactly where I was, even without having to bring up my reference image to check. But after turning ninety degrees to look at a different bit of equally nondescript countryside, something clicked. I reached the location specified, and frowned, as I appeared to be looking at a generic, nondescript bit of countryside.
In recent years, I've gotten really used to water being full of fish and pretty, animated pond weed, but these lakes seemed eerily barren - expanses of sterile dirt with just the occasional, miserable-looking squid living in them.
It's the little things that really stuck out. quaint", I murmured, like a Roman Emperor being offered a wax statue of a dog's cock by a gurning bumpkin, as I picked my way through a landscape made subtly alien by time. For a start, because of there being no creative mode, I had to actually walk to the co-ordinates. Spoiled by nine years of added features, and by spending the last year or so playing almost entirely as a non-violent, flying god in creative mode, I just wasn't prepared for what a different experience it was to play Minecraft back in caveman times. Having played Minecraft on and off for a decade, I figured that this all sounded like a pretty tame challenge.īut as Bane once famously mumbled, peace had cost me my strength. I wouldn't leave the area visible in the rotating panorama from the old title menu, I wouldn't use creative mode (this turned out to be an easy rule to follow, as it didn't exist in 1.7.3), and if I died, I'd delete the installation and never return. From entering the world, I'd give myself three in-game days to find the location from the co-ordinates I'd written down, and build a home there with four walls, a door and a roof. Yep, this image does a pretty artful job of showing just what can change in nine years.Īny good expedition needs parameters, so I set my rules before I embarked. The answer, as it would turn out, is "surprisingly difficult". We've all seen the place hundreds of times, but I wanted to know what it was like to live there. Instead, I thought I would make a pilgrimage to this fabled location by loading the 2011 beta build where it existed, generating a world with the sorcerers' seed, and building a house by the side of that very lake. But since the techniques used to solve it were so unspeakably clever that I could only understand them as literal sorcery, I am probably not the person to ham-fistedly relay that tale. That's about as many atoms as there are in a bee, for reference, making for a pretty daunting puzzle. The discovery of the world's seed is a whole story in itself, about how a group of people managed to deduce a single location from among the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 worlds possible in Minecraft. As you may have seen already, the hillside lake shown on Minecraft's old title screen, which rotated slowly and blurrily between 20, has been located at last.